Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes spoke after Sunday’s loss to the Philadelphia Eagles at Arrowhead Stadium, which dropped the team to 0-2. In his postgame press conference, Mahomes reflected on the defeat and shared confidence in how the Chiefs will respond moving forward. By Dominick Williams| Monty Davis
The most coveted asset in the most coveted position in sports barreled toward a defender and bypassed a league-provided opportunity to protect himself.
Patrick Mahomes did not lower his torso for a baseball slide but instead his shoulder to deliver a hit, and, wait, isn’t this starting to sound a lot like a week earlier? You know, back when Mahomes punished a defender to send his own team a message?
Except, this week, the message was not for his teammates.
It’s for the rest of us.
Mahomes and the Chiefs offense are fresh out of ideas on how to gain a yard, other than one of the all-time great quarterbacks scrambling for his life — and the only pushback that should draw is that I used “fresh” and “Chiefs offense” in the same sentence.
Kansas City looked absent innovation in a 20-17 loss to the Phildelphia Eagles in a Sunday afternoon Super Bowl rematch that should leave them feeling better than they did after that February outcome only in margin of defeat.
The problem isn’t that the Chiefs are 0-2 for the first time since Mahomes took over.
It’s bigger: This offense has stunk.
The Chiefs have transformed from a unit rich in ideas into a quarterback turning his pockets inside-out, looking for help.
It’s painful to watch, so ugly Sunday that if someone wants to argue we’re seeing the beginning of the end of a dynastic reign, the only counterpoint I could provide is about who’s not playing. The Chiefs are tired of operating short-handed, but man if the production doesn’t remind us of that.
Russell Wilson threw for 450 yards Sunday quarterbacking the New York Giants. In the afternoon game opposite the Super Bowl rematch, Bryce Young threw for 328 in a Panthers loss. And a Patriots team that calls DeMario Douglas and Kayshon Boutte starting wide receivers put up 33 points.
It can be done, even with lesser talent.
I’ve heard many times that the Chiefs just haven’t looked themselves yet. But this is who the Chiefs have been offensively for more than a game or two — frustration before entertainment — masked by a top-10 defense and an uncanny knack for their best in the end-of-game moments.
The Chiefs haven’t scored more than 30 points in a game since the 2023 season, one of just three teams on that list. The Bills, Ravens and Lions reached 31 points Sunday — the 11th time since the start of last year. The Chiefs have topped 400 yards of offense just once since the start of last season. No team in the NFL has done it fewer.
I’ve often used this space to explain that we grade the Chiefs on a championship curve, fair or not, and I’ve always considered the former, because it’s how they’ve graded themselves. But forget the curve. They just lost a game in which the defense held a defending Super Bowl champion to 216 yards. You can’t lose that game.
What gives? Well, Mahomes mentioned multiple times that there are several things at play, a fact that should give no one comfort.
The offensive line remains a work in progress. The Chiefs don’t have a healthy receiver who can separate from man-to-man coverage. The running game moves in slow-motion. The 35-year-old tight end found himself involved in the game’s biggest play for all the wrong reasons and spent the afternoon running through the gamut of ways he could think to show his anger.
The Chiefs need Travis Kelce more than ever, and even if his talent isn’t what once was, it ought to be a compliment that his leadership isn’t what it once was, either. He spent the afternoon yelling and ripping off his chinstrap on the way off the field.
It’s a lot, enough to make you sick of this (crap), as you might put it. Or someone might put it, anyway.
But I’m still going to spotlight just one thing.
The Chiefs’ offseason talk of a downfield passing game might as well have been focused on discovering Bigfoot. A 49-yard touchdown strike to Tyquan Thornton in the closing moments doesn’t change that.
With four minutes to play, the Chiefs had completed all of one pass that traveled at least 10 yards in the air. A quarterback who calls himself a gunslinger is holstering a Nerf toy, and at times he looks timid to pull the trigger.
Since the start of the 2023 season, per data from The 33rd team, Mahomes has a 75.3 passer rating when targeting receivers at least 10 yards downfield. The box score Sunday doesn’t buck a trend; it illuminates one. You can’t consistently move the football when you shrink the field. It’s hard enough already.
The receivers are open on rare occasion, yet too frequently when Mahomes did have an opening, it still turned to disaster.
• He had Kelce open at the goal line for a go-ahead score in the fourth quarter, a chance to mask all of this once more, but he rushed it a tad. The pass deflected off Kelce and into the arms of Eagles safety Andrew Mukuba for an interception. The pass has to be caught first and foremost, a truth that Kelce will probably share freely when the red light for his podcast flips on this week. He was unavailable to speak to the media after the game.
• On his very first pass of the game, Mahomes had his other tight end, Noah Gray, open on a corner route along the sideline, a perfect cover-2 beater, but Mahomes overshot him.
• Mahomes had wide receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster open for a healthy gain, but his pass got deflected at the line of scrimmage.
Through two games, the record is a one-off. Literally. We’ve never seen it before in the Mahomes Era.
But the Chiefs treading on dangerous ground absent some life from the offense. Last year’s formula of waiting until the final moments to arrive — six victories on the last play — isn’t easy to replicate. That’s what these two weeks should remind us, not just of this year’s start but last year’s difficulty, too.
They still have ample time to change the record. There are 15 games left, and some potential AFC contenders sharing their own struggles. But can they change the formula?